Study of mental iteration in different design situations

Mental iteration in engineering design is a repetition of cognitive activities occurring in designers' thinking process. While the importance of mental iteration has been recognized, the current understanding about it is still very limited. In this paper, we propose a framework to study mental iteration in different design situations. A cognitive activity model of conceptual design is developed to identify and capture various loops of cognitive activities. An experiment is conducted to study the effect of design problems and constraints on the behavior of mental iteration. The results indicate differences of iterative behaviors in response to different problem types and constraint conditions.